Use Concise Verbal Summaries
team members, non-technical team members, and stakeholders outside of the core team.
These three groups tend to look for very different things in a performance report and are
inclined to prefer different presentation methods. When reporting, make sure that you
identify which group or groups you are reporting to and what their expectations are
before deciding on the best way to present the results you have collected.
results are best or most easily presented in writing alone. What you decide to include in
that text depends entirely on your intended audience. Some audiences may require just
one or two sentences capturing the key point(s) you are trying to make with the graphic.
For example:
"From observing this graph, you can see that the system under test meets all stated
performance goals up to 150 hourly users but at that point degrades quickly to an
essentially unusable state."
Other audiences may also require a detailed explanation of the graph being presented. For
example:
"In this graph, you see the average response time in seconds, portrayed vertically on the
left side of the graph, plotted against the total number of hourly users simulated during
each test execution, portrayed horizontally along the bottom of the graph. The
intersection points depict "
should not be shared in its raw form out of fear that the consumers of that data will use or
analyze it improperly. While this concern is not invalid, of much greater concern is the
fact that it is simply not reasonable to expect any one person or team to be able to extract
all of the value from a set of data at one point in time. Data provides different value to
different people at different times, and the only way to get the most out of the data is to
make that data continually available to the team. Additionally, making the data available
tends to minimize some people's perception that the performance results are simply
fabrications based on a set of tools and processes that they do not understand.
follow describe what makes this data interesting to whom, as well as considerations for
reporting that type of data.
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